Put yourself in your user’s shoes.

Look for a few simple tasks that the majority of your users do frequently and think about how a mobile app could make those tasks easier. Spend some time in their workspace by attending a few meetings or going out to a job site. You’ll get invaluable insight into their work habits, bottlenecks in the workflow, and employee or customer pain points.

Involving your users

Invite particularly insightful or passionate users to join your project team to provide ongoing input. Giving them a voice in the process will help you refine your concepts and when your app is complete your users will embrace the solution knowing they had a hand in the creative process.

Crowdsourcing. Genentech knew that great app ideas can come from anywhere and anyone, so they created a crowdsourcing model that takes in suggestions from employees on what apps they would like to see developed internally. They have since created the top 5 requested apps to extraordinary user satisfaction and adoption.

Execs Talk Series Video

Genentech wanted to build apps for the most critical needs of their employees. So they created a crowd-sourced solution for getting new app ideas and gave their employees a feedback loop they never had before.

“We want to make sure that weʼre capturing what the business needs are. People across GE have a strong understanding of that. They live it, theyʼve been working with their customers for years, and they understand exactly whatʼs needed.”

— James Blomberg, General Electric

Planning Checklist

By the end of the planning phase you should have a scope of work that includes:

Inventory of all potential business needs/requirements

IT infrastructure requirements to support project effort

Application definition statement describing the app and purpose of the solution

General project timeline and milestones

Identified team of stakeholders with roles and responsibilities defined

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